1. Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages;Green;Dynamis, Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam,2000
2. The eclectic collection in this manuscript is well known for its diversity of texts, many of which are typical of a young female reader. For another extensive vernacular, domestic use collection of remedies and treatments recorded in the Thornton Manuscript, see Margaret Sinclair Ogden (ed.), The Liber de Diversis Medicinis in the Thornton Manuscript MS Lincoln Cathedral A.5.2. (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1938). Most manuscripts of English origin in this period were not so eclectic, for comparison see Linda E. Voigts, ‘Scientific and Medical Books’, in Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (eds), Book Production and Publishing in Britain , 1375–1475 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 345–402. For intertextuality in medieval herbals and their affinity to remedy collections see Martti Mäkinen, ‘Between Herbals ‘et alia’: Intertexuality in Medieval English Herbals’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Helsinki, 2006).
3. During the period when this manuscript was written, England still had control of Calais and a number of literate families, including those connected with MS Lansdowne 380, would have had contacts on both sides of the channel. In her survey of the scant records that provide evidence of women owners, Monica Green has noted that a third of known medical texts, which were addressed to women, are ‘in French, and French (and French-speaking) women are the most densely represented group among female owners of medical books’. Monica Green, ‘The Possibilities of Literacy and the Limits of Reading: Women and the Gendering of Medieval Literacy’, in Monica H. Green (ed.), Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum Studies, 2000), Essay VII.
4. On the role of male physicians and focusing on male authority in matters of women's health care, see the extensive research carried out by Green in Making Women's Medicine Masculine. Francesca Moore discusses the cultural practice and preference of women using empirical practitioners, which still existed in the twentieth century, in her ‘“Go and see Nell; She'll put you right”: The Wisewoman and Working-Class Health Care in Early-Twentieth Century Lancashire’, Social History of Medicine, 2013, 26, 1–20. For the problems in identifying female practitioners by their occupational titles see Monteserrat Cabré, ‘Women or Healers? Household Practices and the Categories of Health Care in Late Medieval Iberia’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2008, 82, 18–51. For further evidence of women's medical knowledge in semi-private writings see Elaine E. Whitaker, ‘Reading the Paston Letters Medically’, English Language Notes, 1993, 31, 19–27.
5. Although Green acknowledges that a third of the vernacular translations of the Trotula (see note 7) are addressed to women and ‘that women probably did own and use some of them’, her focus and emphasis remains on the male control and use of written information. Green, Making Women's Medicine Masculine, 24–5 and ch. 4.